A UK eBay listing for a Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch: the seller says they got it free and don't want it. Photograph: Guardian

The advert was blunt: a second-hand Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch for sale, priced at "£100 ONO". For a device which cost £299 in September, surely that's a bargain?

Yet after a week advertised on the intranet of an non-technical organisation with more than 10,000 staff, it was still unsold. "Nothing hangs around our noticeboard that long," one who saw the ad told me.

Separately, the same organisation had another Galaxy Gear for sale - priced at "any offer". That did sell (how can you argue with "any price"?) but together the adverts for a device that was barely six months old point to a problem some people are beginning to suspect about "wearables" - that if you don't get it just right, they're done.

That observation is strengthened by research from Endeavour Partners in the US, which found that one-third of American consumers who have owned a wearable product stopped using it within six months. What's more, while one in 10 American adults own some form of activity tracker, half of them no longer use it.

So what's the problem with smartwatches and fitness trackers? Are they just too early? Or is it something more fundamental?

The tale of the smartwatches is mixed. One was acquired when the owner bought a Galaxy Note 3 smartphones; the mobile network offered the Gear as a cheap add-on. But the buyer, having got it, decided it was ugly and sought to get rid of it.

The other came from someone who definitely wanted it, and used it - but was disappointed when it was superseded within months by the newer version, released by Samsung at Mobile World Congress. "Is that the old one?" the owner was asked by informed friends.

It's against stories like that that one must weigh figures like Samsung's claims of sales for the Galaxy Gear, and the figures from Kantar ComTech, which suggest that there are 426,000 smartwatches owned in Britain, of which 136,000 are Galaxy Gears. (I own and use a Pebble bought through its Kickstarter page; I've mostly been very pleased with it, with one exception.)

But some of those smartwatches, as the above examples suggest, probably aren't being used. A quick search on eBay for "Galaxy Gear" (excluding the words "protector" and "seal" which are used to sell add-ons) turns up nearly 900 results, of which this one, chosen at random, is typical: "I got it free with my Galaxy Note 3 and do not want this."

The story is the same as that found by CCS Insight, which last autumn found in a survey of more than 1,500 smartphone owners in the US and UK that 65% had heard of smartwatches, and more than 50% knew about fitness trackers; but of those who owned either, 40% had stopped using them because they got bored with the idea, or simply forgot to put it on.

Taken on their own, none of those is conclusive, or even concerning evidence for wearables boosters – except for the last one. But that is the one that really does hold the seeds of a very worrying trend for wearables companies, because the people who have bought fitness trackers and abandoned them should, in theory, be the most eager early adopters.

Early abandonment

For comparison, you wouldn't find people from the early days of the smartphone saying that they'd abandoned their BlackBerry, Treo or Windows Mobile or Symbian phone. They were the early adopters, and they found utility in having email and (sometimes) web pages on the move. The idea of giving them up just wouldn't occur to them.

But fitness trackers, which were meant to spearhead wearables use – because they provided something people would want. The "total addressable market" of gym users in the UK, for example, is substantial: 4.5 million adults have memberships, according to data from TGI; in the US, the figure is about 10 times higher. Those are substantial markets.

Yet the data from Endeavour Partners indicates that fitness trackers are no more sticky than new year's resolutions.

What does that presage for wearables? It may be that they are presently so primitive that it's no surprise that people give them up: they're too big, haven't discovered the killer app that we want out of them, and have battery life that is too limited.

In the early days of MP3 players such as the Diamond Rio, you could tell that they were transformative because the ones using solid-state storage weren't prone to skipping, unlike the CD Walkmans they were trying to disrupt. The trouble was that getting music on to those early players was a pain – you had very limited storage, and comparatively slow connections (USB 1.1, at 12 megabits per second; USB 2 didn't come into widespread use until about 2003).

So lots of those early MP3 players eventually ended up in drawers; but that didn't stop the sector becoming huge. We went from having to carry around CDs and a CD player (or a MiniDisc and player, or cassettes and player) to having the music integrated into the player. And then the player became integrated into other objects, such as our phones.

Integrated life

But it was that integration - the way that the music became part of the music player, rather than being separate (and bulky) - which really showed off the promise of the early devices.

So far, there aren't clear signs of quite what it is that smartwatches and fitness trackers are replacing, in the way that those music players did. Useful new technology has to replace or simplify some function, ideally; otherwise it has the challenge of persuading us that we need this entirely new thing. Smartphones are simpler ways to collect your email – and also make phone calls and surf the web (and so on).

Fitness trackers... let you track your fitness. But given that 41% of people run with their smartphones, you might get by with a movement tracking app instead. The trouble with devices that claim to track your steps is they're so easily hoaxed by waving your arms around.

The Endeavour Partners study, and those for-sale adverts (both physical and on eBay) point to something still unsolved by this first tranche of wearable devices. They're just not that good at exciting us. The problems to be solved - usefulness, battery life, appearance - clearly haven't been. Nor has the real killer app appeared (although there seems to be increasing evidence that people find the notifications on smartwatches useful).

Perhaps the arrival of Android Wear will make a difference - and that the incorporation of Google Now, voice search, and the "cards" system that seems to be part of Android Wear will all add up to an experience that delights the second-generation wearables buyers. It remains to be seen, though. There's a gap between the obvious extra utility that digital music players - or early smartphones - offered, and the very thin reasoning being used to justify a computer on your wrist or waist.

Overall, something seems to be missing from the usefulness that we'd expected to feel. (And I say that as the owner of a smartwatch; I like the way that the Pebble lets me know when someone's calling even if I'm away from my phone and, until the software update, also showed me texts - but only texts, not emails or tweets or Facebook updates; my choice now is to have all or nothing of those, so I choose the latter).

It could be that wearables are poised for a tsunami of success. But those sales notices on the intranet, and those eBay listings, give reason to pause.

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